Data Bytes: Cologix, CyrusOne, Masergy, EarthLink, RingCentral

Lots of interesting news items from the data center this week, from colo up to the cloud:

Cologix is getting ready for some more expansion activity by adding some financial flexibility. They have amended and expanded their secured credit facilities up to $255M, with another $60M in an uncommitted incremental accordion facility. Cologix has been an active consolidator of interconnection-focused data center assets in second tier markets over the past few years, and definitely seems due for another deal.

CyrusOne said this week that it has commissioned a new data hall at its Dallas-area facility in Carrollton. The expansion fills out 60,000 square feet of colo space and 4.5MW of power within the 670,000 square feet they have overall. Earlier this month, CyrusOne expanded into the NYC metro area with the closing of the Cervalis deal, but this week organic expansion in their home turf in Texas is the order of the day.

The managed network operator Masergy has hooked up with another public cloud. They've added Microsoft's Azure to the company's cloud marketplace and connected their SDN-powered network to Azure's data centers. The cloud connectivity market sometimes seems like it went from birth to maturity in record time, although the nature of the market is definitely still evolving.

EarthLink has expanded its own cloud capabilities further with some managed networking of its own. Their Cloud Express will offer secure, private connections along their WAN to AWS, Azure, and others to its enterprise customers. Earthlink has been retrenching this year, refocusing its efforts to convert from CLEC/ISP to cloud services after its initial efforts failed to live up to expectations.

And over in the world of cloud communications, RingCentral says it has fully integrated its business VoIP and PBX systems with Microsoft Office 365. After a decade of not being where they should most of the time, Microsoft's name sure does seem to be coming up a lot more with Azure and 365. They seem to have finally found a path out of the 20th century world of software in boxes.